48 REVIEWS GEOGRAPHY OF BRITISH AMERlCAi 



one of tlie most obvious wants of our Scholastic system ; and issued^ 

 as "we may presume it to be, under the authority, or at least with the 

 approbation of the Chief Superintendent of Public Instruction, we 

 may anticipate its general adoption throughout the Common Schools 

 of the Province. Should such be the case a new edition must soon 

 be required ; and this will aiford the author an opportunity, which we 

 trust he will avail himself of, to make a careful revision of the text 

 and remove from it sundry evidences of haste in the original com- 

 position, as well as of carelessness in the press-reading. 



In case of such a revision, other amendments may probably occur to 

 the author. "We very much question, for example, the fitness/or good 

 taste of introducing into a school-book biographical sketches of living 

 celebrities, — political and ecclesiastical, — some of whose names are still 

 bandied about in our daily press, and associated with sectarian or 

 party cries. That is not a direction in which we have any reason to 

 apprehend a want of instruction for the rising generation. We 

 can scarcely anticipate satisfactory results from such " school exer- 

 cises" as the following : — " Grive a sketch of the career of Sir Allan 

 MacNab," or " The Hon. M. S. Bidwell," or " Sketch the Career of 

 the Hon. Erancis Hincks." These and other names introduced here 

 are still the shibboleths of party politics ; and some of them, at least, 

 are destined to be forgot as soon as they cease to be so. They must 

 be as unacceptable to many parents' ears as they may be welcome to 

 others. To sketch the career of living politicians is a new demand 

 on the class form. 



The sketch of the Indian tribes of Canada is concise, and, on the 

 whole, comprehensive in its brevity. On one or two points, however, it 

 would be benefitted by revision. In the matter of Indian names, 

 especially, we think the affected purism, which aims at a return to 

 the aboriginal etymon, peculiarly out of place in a school-book. Now 

 that the name Ottawa, for example, is fixed in the termonology of our 

 Canadian geography, it can only lead to confusion to perpetuate such 

 terms as iTtawas, Atawawas, Odahwas, &c. Again, we have Odjibwas 

 and Wyandots : the least familiar formes of the names of tribes, one 

 of which still embraces the most numerous of our Upper Canadian 

 Aborigines, while the other has bequeathed its more familiar designa- 

 tion to Lake Huron. The accuracy which aims at including all the 

 diverse terms, and every variation of such names, as the student may 

 chance to meet with in minute research, is worse than useless when 

 presented to the indiscriminatiug and luiretentive memory of a child. 

 Let him learn first to associate all his ideas on the subject with one 



